Bill Frist In A Dress

So I'm channel-flipping this evening, feeling out of touch with what's gone on today, and for the most part of the week. It's been a big news week, and a big news day: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testifying on the Hill, hundreds of deaths this week in Iraq, and the Virginia Tech shootings, to name a few.

Anyway, while flipping between Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly, I see a criminal profiler on O'Reilly who was on CNN last night. Pat somethingorother. I noted her, because she caught my limited attention span on CNN last night for being pretty inappropriate in her language as an "expert" on criminal behavior. She had obvious anger at the guy who did the shootings, and used words like 'loser.' Yes he was a loser, but she obviously missed the larger point of his psychosis.

Tonight on O'Reilly, she pulled a Bill Frist (remember, physician Frist, Senator from Tennessee, diagnosed Terry Schiavo from the floor of the Senate?) and diagnosed the guy in the VT shootings as psychopathic, not psychotic. She pointed out the differences between psychosis and psychopathology, from her limited frame of reference, and didn't see him as crazy. She saw him as too functional for that.

She's a profiler.

She felt confident that even in the face of the video the (very, very) crazy guy put out, she called him psychopathic. Because he was so functional. After all, he made it to college.

I work with mentally ill people, and some of the people I work with kick my ass in intelligence. And some have been pretty high functioning at times in their life. But no, this douchebag thinks he was psychotic psychopathic. Who are you going to believe, the criminal profiler being wooed from afar by O'Reilly, or your lying eyes?